your very
learned and illustrious friend, Dr. Johnson, labours under at present.'

'TO JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ. 'DEAR SIR,

'Presently after I had sent away my last letter, I received your kind
medical packet. I am very much obliged both to you and your physicians
for your kind attention to my disease. Dr. Gillespie has sent me an
excellent _consilium medicum_, all solid practical experimental
knowledge. I am at present, in the opinion of my physicians, (Dr.
Heberden and Dr. Brocklesby,) as well as my own, going on very
hopefully. I have just begun to take vinegar of squills. The powder hurt
my stomach so much, that it could not be continued.

'Return Sir Alexander Dick my sincere thanks for his kind letter; and
bring with you the rhubarb[815] which he so tenderly offers me.

'I hope dear Mrs. Boswell is now quite well, and that no evil, either
real or imaginary, now disturbs you.

'I am, &c.

'SAM. JOHNSON.'

'London, March 2, 1784.'

I also applied to three of the eminent physicians who had chairs in our
celebrated school of medicine at Edinburgh, Doctors Cullen, Hope, and
Monro, to each of whom I sent the following letter:--

'DEAR SIR,

'Dr. Johnson has been very ill for some time; and in a letter of anxious
apprehension he writes to me, "Ask your physicians about my case."

'This, you see, is not authority for a regular consultation: but I have
no doubt of your readiness to give your advice to a man so eminent, and
who, in his _Life of Garth_, has paid your profession a just and elegant
compliment: "I believe every man has found in physicians great
liberality and dignity of sentiment, very prompt effusions[816] of
beneficence, and willingness to exert a lucrative art, where there is no
hope of lucre."

'Dr. Johnson is aged seventy-four. Last summer he had a stroke of the
palsy, from which he recovered almost entirely. He had, before that,
been troubled with a catarrhous cough. This winter he was seized with a
spasmodick asthma, by which he has been confined to his house for about
three months. Dr. Brocklesby writes to me, that upon the least admission
of cold, there is such a constriction upon his breast, that he cannot
lie down in his bed, but is obliged to sit up all night, and gets rest
and sometimes sleep, only by means of laudanum and syrup of poppies; and
that there are oedematous tumours on his legs and thighs. Dr. Brocklesby
trusts a good deal to the return of mild weather. Dr. Johnson says, that